Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (OTC: SSNLF) has a major new win in its bag - after winning a contract to supply chips to Elon Musk's Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA), the Korean conglomerate will now supply camera modules as well.
What Happened: Samsung has won a contract to supply camera modules to a US electric vehicle company, likely Tesla, reported The Korean Economic Daily.
"We have signed a contract to supply camera modules to the US automaker. The quantity and amount of supply have not been determined," Samsung Electro-Mechanics said in a release on Monday (Sept. 4).
Samsung Electro-Mechanics is a subsidiary of the Samsung Group.
Tesla relies on camera vision for its self-driving technology, also known as Full Self-Driving (FSD). It has been in talks with Samsung since 2022 for camera modules to power its FSD technology which it is increasingly becoming confident about.
This is the second major win for Samsung in the EV space this year - earlier in July, Samsung won the contract to supply chips that will power Tesla's Level-5 autonomous driving vehicles.
The Tesla Model S, X, Y, and 3 are expected to be equipped with Samsung's camera modules.
Samsung Is Now A Key Tesla Supplier: With the collaboration between Tesla and Samsung now stronger, the company is now one of the key suppliers of Tesla. Samsung parts will now equip Tesla cars' eyes and brains.
Last year, there were reports of Samsung replacing LG Innotek as the lead camera module supplier - the LG subsidiary accounted for 70% of the camera modules in Tesla EVs, while Samsung provided the remaining 30%.
Samsung will now provide 5MP camera sensors to Tesla, which are capable of producing up to five times more detailed images than the previous camera modules.
This is also a key win for Samsung's foundry division, which has otherwise struggled to catch up with the Taiwan-based TSMC for smartphone chipsets.